In the fall of 2005 I was approached by Jonathan Towers, producer of Inside 9/11, a four-hour documentary on the road to 9/11 in which I was one of 60 journalists and government officials interviewed. I told Towers that I was working on a new investigative book exposing FBI negligence in its nine year failure to stop Ali A. Mohamed, al Qaeda's chief spy who infiltrated the Bureau, the CIA and the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Towers immediately optioned my research and flew me to Washington where I presented TRIPLE CROSS, my new book to John Ford, programming president of the Nat Geo Channel. He bought the project in the room, declaring, "I don't know how we can't do a documentary."

Over Christmas I wrote a 12 page ten-act treatment outlining the two key parts of the Ali Mohammed story: First, how he'd come to the U.S. in 1985, seduced a California woman into marriage, enlisted in the U.S. Army and got himself assigned to the JFK Special Warfare School at Bragg. From there, as he stole top secret documents for his chief sponsor, al Qaeda's No. 2 Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed commuted to New York City on weekends where he trained key members of the first WTC bombing cell and the notorious "Day of Terror" cell responsible for a plot to blow up the U.N. and the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.

In 1991 Mohamed moved bin Laden and 100's of al Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan to Sudan, set up al Qaeda's training camps in Khartoum and literally wrote al Qaeda's manual of terror. In 1993 he trained members of the al Qaeda contingent that downed two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters in Somalia, brokered a meeting between bin Laden and the head of Hezbollah and personally took the pictures of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi that Osama bin Laden himself used to target the suicide truck bombs that killed 224 in Kenya in 1998.

That part of my research was presented in the Nat Geo documentary that aired on Monday.